FlexReview

Learn about Aviator FlexReview, a framework that speeds up code reviews by understanding the nuances of every code change and assigning reviewers.

Read our launch post about why we built FlexReview: https://www.aviator.co/blog/flexreview-a-flexible-code-review-framework/

What is FlexReview

FlexReview is a modern code review platform focused on on collaborative teams. It acts as a drop-in replacement for GitHub CODEOWNERS . FlexReview uses domain expertise and recursive ownership to avoid rigid boundaries of GitHub CODEOWNERS.

Components

There are two main components of FlexReview:

• Reviewer assignment - Automatically assign code reviewers for selective (or all) pull requests based on the configured preferences.

• Review Validation - Ensure that appropriate approvals have been granted before a pull request is considered mergeable.

Concepts

There are a few core concepts that differentiates FlexReview from a rigid GitHub CODEOWNERS framework.

• Domain expertise

  • A score calculated based on past history of authorship and reviewership. This is calculated for each file and each user to ensure FlexReview can assign the right reviewers.

• Recursive ownership

  • True representation of the actual shape of code ownership to avoid rigidness of GitHub CODEOWNERS.

  • Simplified ownership definition using distributed YAML files

• Reviewers minimization

  • When a PR spans multiple teams, it finds a common parent owner and minimizes number of reviewers. One or more reviewers are assigned depending on the code complexity.

  • All reviewer assignments are predictable and governed by rules, so you can stay compliant.

• Team automations

  • Each team can choose an assignment strategy from domain expertise, review load, or oncall rotations.

  • Slack notification can be sent to team's channel when there's new PR for your team.

  • Reviewer can be auto-reassigned when there's no reply.

• Team dashboard and SLO goals

  • Team members can see the PRs that are assigned to them, or their entire team.

  • Teams can define the expected size of the PRs and review turnaround time.

  • Dashboard shows how many PRs are within the review-time SLO.

• Selective Dismissal

  • A validation system to ensure that appropriate approvals have been granted before a pull request is considered mergeable.

  • Reviewers are responsible for approving on behalf of the files they own.

  • Reviewers can be selectively dismissed when new code changes are pushed tied to their ownership.

  • Includes a break-glass override for emergency approvals.

Basic ownership config

Since FlexReview automatically tracks domain expertise for each, you can simply define a top level ownership such that the code is collectively owned by all of engineering, and FlexReview will automatically assign the right reviewers.

* @engineering

However, most teams would want to define a bit more fine-grained ownership, where recursive ownership helps provide that flexibility.